Sourcing Automation with Microsoft PAD - We cracked the code!

Oh, somebody just told me that I am on mute. Well, that's interesting. I wonder if audio is on now. It should be now. Okay. Sorry about that. Starting over again. Happy Friday, everybody. It is Shelly's Alley. It's 1:04 PM on Friday the 23rd. So I was hoping that we would have somebody today join us to do some live examples, but so far nobody's taken me up on that. I do have good news though. Starting on our next episode, we will begin the new leadership series. I'll be bringing on some talent sourcing leaders and talent acquisition recruiting leaders to talk about things that are on their mind, the problems of today, right? What are we solving for today? And answer questions in a very conversational format. So the idea here is not to, you know, go into anything political or formal, but talk about what keeps you up at night around sourcing, around recruiting. How do you define quality? What does a success profile look like in today's, you know, recruiter and sourcer world? Things like that, right? How are we responding to environment, to disruptive technology? Et cetera, from a leadership point of view, and hear what they have to say, what their tips are. So starting next week. As for this week, since I didn't have anybody take me up on my offer to do some live sourcing, I figured I would just do some live sourcing on my own on a project that my team's been working on. So that's what we're going to talk about today. And that is working with people that are software engineers, but in a, in a, in a different industry, something off the beaten path, not the kind of people that you would actually find on GitHub or Stack Overflow because they don't really write open source software. What they do is they write software for industrial systems, for industrial control systems, for example. And so these are the folks that are working on the machines, creating the machines, controlling the machines in factories and so on. So this is pretty off the beaten path. They don't really talk about the same kinds of things, and they don't publish to, you know, code repositories and so on. So how do I go about finding these kinds of people? Well, they do exist on online forums. They do go to trade shows. They do go to school. So we can find them in a lot of other ways. Just not basically a LinkedIn search, although there probably are some on LinkedIn as well, and not through, you know, what you would consider traditional software engineering, um, environments, right? So what do we do? Well, the first thing I did was to think about what are the different job titles, and unfortunately I did not find a whole lot of commonality. In fact, there are so many different job titles that it's just really confusing. I mean, some have engineers, some have programmers, some have— don't have that at all. Technician, field services, very, very job titles. So job titles didn't help me very much. The second thing I looked at were companies, and that helped me a lot. So what do I mean by companies? Well, targeting the organizations that do this kind of work. So let me share my screen and show you a couple of things that I did. First of all, I thought about the keywords and I did a search on basically industrial controls just to get a feel for the industry, kind of starting broad, starting wide. So industrial controls has all kinds of industries. I found out It works with air conditioning systems. It works with automotive. It works with all kinds of microchip manufacturers and so on. So I needed to narrow it down a little bit. And I thought, all right, let's narrow it down to industrial controls with programmable logic, where the engineer would actually be basically sending commands directly to the machine. and I found this programmable logic controller definition is an industrial computer control system. So I thought to myself, okay, here's one company, Advanced Microcontrollers. Okay, AMC, I know them. So I thought, okay, let's try PLC and AMC. Good start. Okay, now what if I found another company like that? What else is out there? So let's see if I can find other companies that do PLC and see if I can target them. And I got a nice little list here from this Robotics and Automation News website. Great start. This has essentially become my target list here. There's 20 programmable logic— sorry, that scrolled up there— 20 programmable logic controller manufacturers. These are the companies that make the equipment. Well, these are not the companies that employ the people necessarily. I mean, of course they do, but these are not necessarily the target companies I want to recruit from. It does make a good list of the products that are out there: Allen-Bradley, Rockwell, Schneider, ABB, Honeywell Process, Omron, etc. And then I thought to myself, okay, let's use these keywords. So for example, the tool named Rexroth, or the tool named, um, let's pick something a little bit more— Panasonic may be a little too broad because that can be a lot of things. So I wanted to pick a tool that had a unique name that only really existed in that space. So that Rexroth came up. Looks like there's another one here, um, Simatic, S-I-M-A-T-I-C. And maybe Alan Bradley has one. Don't see one right there. So we've got somatic, we've got ABB, we've got Alan Bradley, and I thought I saw another really good unique keyword here. Oh, Rex Roth, right? Okay, so let's try Rex Roth. So now I'm thinking, okay, PLC and Rex Roth. Aha, that's a company. Maybe what we're looking for now are, are people. So going back to my— I think it was Advanced Micro. Let me double-check and make sure it's Advanced Micro. Yes, Advanced Micro, or AMD or Rexroth and also add to that something like PLC, just for now. I'll expand on that a little bit later. Hmm, interesting. What if I looked for both Advanced Micro and Rexroth? So now I'm taking out Rexroth from here and I'm looking for Advanced Micro or AMD. And Rexroth. The idea is to try to find maybe a list of companies that is going to show me the names of the actual systems. And look at that, here's Bosch, Rexroth. That looks like their products. Maybe I can find other lists of companies that have, you know, those kinds of products. Perfect. So where do we go from here? Let's start looking for where these companies hang out, where they work. So in doing that, I came across a couple of websites. One of them was this website here called Industrial Automation Exchange, um, csiaexchange.com. And I found them because of, um, an individual's name that I found somewhere else. So interesting. Let's see what we can do with this. This domain lends itself really well to using it with the site command. So what we need is just the site command, S-I-T-E, which indexes or tells the search engine to only find the websites that have been indexed under this domain, CSI Exchange. I'm just going to start with that and see how big this website is. Wow, it's very, very big. Good. So now let's see what else I can identify from that pattern. So it looks like this is a contact page. So maybe I can look for contacts or organizations or what else is on this page that tells me this is an individual contact. Let's see in the source code. What we can find. Maybe there's something in the meta tag here. There's the title, but that's just CSIA, which is the organization itself. Let's see what else we can find. Not a whole lot right now that looks very revealing. Content. Yeah, not a whole lot. So that's okay. Let's go back to that and see what about other things. Well, if we go to Contacts, we might be able to search through their database for contacts, but it looks like it actually does it by company, so that's not helpful. And then if I go backwards to Integrators, this is where I see a list of all these different companies. Useful, but that's not exactly a directory. So not exactly what I was looking for. This probably would be good for finding a list of companies though. So maybe I can go back and search for integrators or, you know, and get that list. But I'm really interested more in finding people like this. Now I know Mike is not the right person because I found him on the Telstra website. So he's someone who's an officer, probably very prominent at the company. In fact, it was even around the context of contracts and things like that. So not the right person, but this Industrial Automation Exchange may have other content in it. So how about we just look for companies? Because I see that's in here and it is listed almost like an organization kind of directory. So let's go back to our Search here and put in organizations. Remember, that's what's on the left-hand— sorry, right-hand side over here, and see if other pages have that. And then maybe add one of our keywords like AMD or Advanced Micro. Not sure how they might be listed. Hmm, not a whole lot of content. How about that Rexroth? Aha, 21 contacts. There we go, now we're talking. So here we have Daniela Cabello, Dave Wampler, Arnold, etc. Perfect. Not all of these are profiles. Some of them are other pages, but that's all right. I can take a look at some of these patterns and see what else we can find. I did notice down here that the search had omitted a few results, probably because of site compression. So let's turn that off. And I see now 36 results, a lot more of these kind of exchange and find the integrator things. I'm curious, I'm going to take a look and see what that is. It may be the company or organization page. In fact, it's basically just the directory, which we don't really need. So now let's focus in on these profiles here. I'm going to open a couple of them and see if I can find any patterns. Here's one. Different country, so Not sure if that's terribly useful. Here's another one. Ha, here we go. So this is a salesperson. So now we have a company name and we know that there's job titles. Maybe we can combine this with a job title, like perhaps engineer or programmer, and see if we can find those types of profiles in here. Aha, look at this. We found the profile of an engineer. Well, not just an engineer, a vice president of engineering. Maybe a little bit too high up, but it tells me that we're on the right track. So we know we can find people with bios, email addresses, and phone numbers that are engineers. Let's keep going then and see what else we can find. So we have application, electrical. So, so here you start noticing some of these job titles, you know, application engineer and electrical engineer. Neither of those tell you that they're a software engineer. Here's another one, controls engineer. Let's try that. Let's try just controls engineer. Oh, much better. I'm going to pull up a couple of these here. Perfect. Email address, phone number, and look, you can even fax them if you want to. I wonder if you'd be like the only person to send them a fax in the last, I don't know, 10 years maybe. So spot on. This is a direct hit. Now, if this person, you know, would be perhaps open to relocating or, you know, that might work because I didn't tell you where the search is and this happens to be in Fort Collins. We also did not narrow that down, but we could. Here's another controls engineer in Wisconsin. So you can see how this turned into something really useful. It just started by looking at a list of companies, then finding an association, with a, you know, like, well, actually I found one of the companies and I found a name, used that name and found an association. And from there I found a bunch of different leads of controls engineers. And what I would encourage you to do is try also other job titles here. So don't be limited to just the one that you had good success with. And going back to our Power Automate Desktop days, You can imagine how easy it would be to use Power Automate on this, to simply click on all of these links, open them in a new page, scrape the information, and extract it into a spreadsheet. And then you can even send that spreadsheet into your CRM and have it automatically send emails. Hey, I found you on the CSIA Exchange. Do you have a moment to talk to me? And so on. Pretty nifty, right? Let's go back and see what else we can find. So here's that individual. Um, I also did a search for the email address for Telstra. Let me actually go back to some of these here, see if I can find— there's a Nova Systems and Applied Sciences Group. Okay, so what I did is I had the name of the company and the domain for that company. By the way, the email address may not be the same as the URL for their website. In the case of Motorola, for example, someone who works at Motorola has a MOT email address, not Motorola. So you want to be conscientious of that and make sure that you're searching for the right keyword. But the point is, I'm taking that Nova Systems in this case, or that, um, asgrp.com, and using that as a search. So let's go and see what we can find for that. Now we'll do a search for any kind of document. In this particular case, I want to try and find spreadsheets, file type XLS, and I want to specify spreadsheets that have certain things in them like phone numbers and email addresses, because that will be more likely to have like a list of contacts. So let's put in maybe just name. And then I'll add some of these domains like asgrp.com. That's one. And there was another one I want to try as well, which is this novasystemsinc.com. You'll notice I do a lot of copying and pasting. That's so that I don't accidentally commit typos, which I'm very, very prone to do. So here we have file type XLS, then name And now let's use asgrp.com, or I'm putting those in quotation marks just to make sure, although it— to make sure that they're included, although sometimes it's still going to get excluded anyway, but that's all right. So one of these two, and why not, let's add also Telstar Inc. Or @telstarinc. See what we get. Looks like there's not many matches. Okay, doesn't really seem like it's a lot, but look, it's Department of Transportation Highway Work Permit. Interesting. I'm curious what that is, so I'm going to go ahead and download that behind the scenes. Don't worry, I've got pretty good file protection systems here. And open it. Hopefully it doesn't take forever to open. Okay, look, interesting. So this is a spreadsheet, and let's see, was it Telstra? Nope. Was it— which one was it that opened up here? ASGRP. Let's try that one. There it is. Okay, so we have John Conway Applied Sciences Group. We have a phone number. We have no idea what the person does. That's okay, we can just take the name and pretty much just Google that. John Conway and Applied Sciences group, and we might find an article. Here's a press release. Apparently he's a CEO of a virtual software system, so it may not be the right direction because it looks like that's not PLC. That's okay. Now let's try a different type of document, perhaps a PDF. Oh, now we're getting somewhere. Here, products. Okay. I want to make sure that I'm not mixing things up too much, so I'm going to just focus on one of these. ASG— well, actually, no, we just saw that was not the right company. Let's try Nova Systems. Focus on that one and see what we get. Aha, bidders list. I like bidders lists. A bidder's list is something that has to be published and documented when companies bid for public works projects, and it basically shows the name of all the primary contacts. Now, this is more than likely almost exclusively going to be salespeople, contracts people, you know, officers in the company, but what it does give us is patterns of the domains like Johnson Controls, JCI. And it does also tell us that these are companies that are in this space. So there's Piper Electric. I should have thought of Johnson Controls. I don't know why I didn't think of that one before. Enhance Automation. So these are all good target companies. And now we have their phone number pattern. We have their email pattern. These may not be the right people, but these are the right direction to go in. So looking through the rest of these, we might come across similar things. In fact, I did. I actually came across this document that was an improvement project. Arden Pump— I don't know what that is— N19 Pump 3 Improvements Project. And this was a pre-bidding meeting. I have no idea why this was published, but here's the names of all of the people that attended. And you'll find— look, one of them is even handwritten. So you'll find contacts in here as well. Phone numbers, email addresses— these are all mobile numbers too. Uh, let's see, these may not be the right types of people, so that's okay. How about this one? Ah, right, this is the one where I found Mike from Telstra Instruments. And see what else is in here. Looks like a few other companies, but these are not all PLC, just a few of them. So maybe not an exact match. There's roofing, there's landscape. By the way, if you're wondering where this came from, this is also one of those kinds of bid lists. So as you can see, it can be pretty productive. There's that one and that one, and we'll close that. Okay, let's see what else. Bidders reports, control design report. Okay, this is not a bidders list. I'm curious, let's see what this is. Oh, it's some sort of journal or publication. Interesting. Okay, these are often very good because they have names of people that are being quoted by the magazine or journal. Some of these are publications of an individual organization. Some of these are publications of an industry standard or an industry association, and they will frequently name names. Let's see what we can find here. Rather than scroll through all of it, I'm going to skip ahead. And see if I can find patterns of text. Ah, here we go. There's a bio of some individual, probably someone who published in this journal. And if you're short on time, that's okay. Maybe just try finding something in here like a pronoun, like he, for example, or she. There's our Hilda. Let's try maybe engineer or control engineer, controls engineer. This one seems to be a quote from someone, so let's see. Banda. Ah, Aurelio Banda, president of Backoff Automation. Okay, well, probably a little bit too high, but that's okay. This is what I was talking about. Here's names of people that are being named, and if you look further, there may be engineers that are also being quoted. Um, here's a quote-unquote portfolio manager. So it takes a little bit of digging, but the reward is that you're going to find people that are not on LinkedIn and they're not being found by every other recruiter on the market, which is really useful when it comes time to start doing outreach. You're not competing for attention with a bunch of other people, especially in this market. So let's see, go back to our exchange. Yeah, I don't think I left anything out there. We found an association, we found some documents, we found some companies. We can even do a Power Automate scrape on some of these. Pretty successful, 20, 20 minutes or so, I would say. While I'm here, another minute that we have left, I see a lot of images and that reminds me of something else I probably would do in a case like this, which I haven't done yet. So this is not something I've been working on. But it does give me a pretty good idea of searching for the word control or controls engineer and then AMD, but then going over to the images on Google. And you'll see sometimes you even get resumes. Now don't be Swayed by these resumes. Many of these are actually just sample resumes, not someone's, you know, a real person's resume. Now, they may be a real person's resume used as a sample, or they may just be, you know, names have been changed and so on. But you can see right here it says resume samples, so, uh, don't be misled by that. However, what I did want to do is look for Something slightly different here. Let's take a look at the advanced search. Seems like they hid that. It's not here anymore. That's okay. Going to images. Sorry, I'm just going to start from the beginning here. Images. Or image.google.com and see if I can get to the advanced from there. It's not really letting me do that. That's okay. Where I was headed was I wanted to find pictures of people. So think, for example, conferences or events. So let me just use a phrase like pictured above or just above. Well, let's try pictured above. Pictured above. Another thing that you can try is the phrases that would be in the captions. So for example, left to right, front row, back row, those kinds of things. Here's one that we found, and this is Virginia Tech, it looks like. Which may lead us to pictures of graduates or students who, you know, maybe they were a student at the time but have since graduated. Looks like this is some sort of publication from the department. And as I mentioned, you can try other types of things, like for example, um, left to right. Imagine a picture with a bunch of people seated or standing or whatever. And there you go. Here's a hybrid rocket engine from RIT. And this is exactly what I wanted to find. So some of these are schools, some of these are companies, and the people being listed are perhaps control or controls engineers. Don't forget to try other variations, right? For example, L.toR .or for example, front row, maybe even clockwise, or etc. And here's an interesting one here, National Aerospace Solutions Next Gen Group. This is so much fun. I just like digging into these kinds of things. All right, so here's the organization's officers. These are not officers of the company. These are some sort of association. And here we see the names. So here's that from left to right. So there you have it. Hopefully I've inspired you to come to a future Shelley's Alley and definitely tune in over the next few weeks. We'll be interviewing industry leaders and asking them some important questions around what problems and challenges they're facing and how they're overcoming them today. That's it for today. Have a great weekend, everybody. Talk to you later.